Friday, December 14, 2012

Polymathic Perversity

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

One of Charles Rosen’s last pieces was a review of The Works of William Congreve, “Congreve: The Most Elegant, Subtle Writer of His Time,” The New York Review of Books,
12/20/12). In his classic Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Norman O. Brown glommed upon Freud’s concept of polymorphous perversity to describe the rich palette of human instinct. Charles Rosen was polymathically perverse. Mr. Rosen who recently died at
the age of 85 was a pianist of note and writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Classic Style, which Margolit Fox’s Times obit described as illuminating "the enduring language of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven ” (“Charles Rosen, 85, Scholar-Musician Who Untangled Classic Works, Dies,” NYT, 12/10/12).“Mr. Rosen, the polymath was possessed of a
lightening-fast seemingly limitless discursiveness that has been described
variously as enchanting and intimidating,” Fox went on to remark. “A conversation
with him, associates have said, typically ranged over a series of enthusiasms
that besides music could include philosophy; art history; architecture: travel
(Mr. Rosen had homes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Paris, where had
first lived as a Fulbright fellow in the early ‘50’s); European literature,
usually read in the original (he had a Ph.D. in French from Princeton); poetry
(he held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship of poetry, an annual
lectureship at Harvard, from l980 to l981); food (he was an accomplished cook), wine and
the glassware it was served in; cognac and the wooden casks it was aged in; and
the television shows ‘Absolutely Fabulous,’ ‘Taxi’ and ‘Cheers.’”From Fox’s description, you might have
regarded Rosen as a Renaissance man, a latter day da Vinci, but Rosen had
greater ground to cover than his 16th Century
counterparts and he wasn’t simply the 21st Century Victorian man of letters, since the sweep of his interests was hi and lo
and included his concert level facility as a musician (finding its origins in his
Juilliard training as a young man). But what accounts for these interests and
ambitions? What accounts for the precocious ability to absorb and collect knowledge. John
Stuart Mill credits his own demanding education in his autobiography.
Mill’s father wanted to create a genius, but as those who have grown up in
competitive environments know, all too well, children often crumble under the burden of their parents's wishes. What Makes Sammy Run? was the name of the famous Budd Shulberg classic about another
kind of ambition. Einstein’s brain was removed after his death and whether
through a pathologist’s report or a biographer’s research, it would be
interesting to learn what made this Charlie run?

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.